Reply to post: Re: 'The Evil Empire' hasn't been evil for about eight years now

Re: 'The Evil Empire' hasn't been evil for about eight years now

Sure they have.

They are still up to their tricks. Their goal is to have you running all Microsoft all the time, from the desktop, to the applications, to the cloud.

Some examples:

- Azure has a PostgreSQL service. It is perpetually behind actual postgres and doesn't support all of the features. Want real PostgreSQL, just run an entire VM complete with OS, or switch over to SQL Server.

- Visual Studio (any version) still doesn't run under Linux, Microsoft would prefer developers develop using a Windows box.

- Microsoft was caught withholding a feature from 'ostensibly' open source .Net 6. They wanted to reserve it for their Visual Studio product, which as mentioned previously, doesn't run under Linux.

- Microsoft's new MAUI .Net subsystem which claims to be a unified front end for application development on Windows, Mac, Android, IOs has conspicuously left Linux out of the list. Microsoft may reluctantly support .Net _server_ development, but they'll be dammed if they are going to make open source development with their open source framework work for desktop development. Oh, and they stole the name MAUI from an existing open source project of the same name. When approached by the project they were basically told to pound sand.

- Linux for Windows subsystem, another attempt to provide a way for developers and dev ops to stay on Windows if they need access to some Linux commands or features.

- PowerShell for Linux, another attempt to keep folks on Windows. It's fairly useless in a pure non-Windows environment. What it is good for is giving Windows dev ops and administrators a familiar _Windows_ environment to use when working on and with Linux servers.

- Microsoft was recently caught strong arming hardware vendors (again) to make it more difficult to get Linux to run on new hardware.

I could go on, but those are just a few examples of Microsoft being Microsoft. Microsoft isn't a *friend* to open source. Even their open source projects, like the .Net Framework, come with Microsoft strings attached. The only lesson they seemed to have learned over the years is that they can't act like the proverbial bull in a china shop. They may make some useful overtures to the open source community, but we trust them at our peril.

As someone famous once said:

"Trust but verify."